Monday, January 4, 2010

In the last couple of weeks, Dan Nicholson and Julien Cristau have been working on revamping the X server configuration and hotplugging code, introducing a couple of new features. This work is now pulled into master and brings about a new way of configuring the X server.

The three new features are:

udev backend support

Support for an xorg.conf.d configuration directory

Support for matching rules in the xorg.conf

udev backend support

Back in 2006, support for hotplugged input devices was added and up to server 1.7, the incarnation worked with HAL as the provider of the input devices. HAL is now deprecated and - at least under Linux - replaced with udev. Julien wrote a new backend that queries udev instead of HAL but otherwise follows the same principle:Upon startup the X server queries the active backend for the list of input devices and initializes them accordingly. When a new device is added at runtime, the server is notified and adds it at runtime. HAL and udev are mutually exclusive, so enabling one disables the other. Currently, udev is disabled by default though I'd like to see it being default for 1.8.

xorg.conf.d support

Over recent years, the xorg.conf support has moved towards two overlapping goals - support partial xorg.conf's with the server filling in the rest and removing the need for an xorg.conf entirely.For most installations the server now has the right defaults and is usable without any configuration file. For the few cases where it is needed, a single section is often enough.

However, one remaining problem was that the xorg.conf is a single file and not easy to programmatically edit. Dan has now added support for a directory-based configuration. Again, the principle is simple: in addition to the xorg.conf file (if it exists), the /etc/xorg.conf.d/**.conf files are read and parsed as well. It performs like expected, with a section being added just as if it was present in the xorg.conf. Hence, a possible configuration may be:

:: whot@barra:~> ls -R /etc/xorg*/etc/xorg.conf

/etc/xorg.conf.d:10-synaptics.conf 97-wacom.conf 99-evdev.conf

Note that the xorg.conf is parsed before the xorg.conf.d, hence it always has precedence. This allows for distributions to populate the xorg.conf.d directory with various quirks, yet still have user-specific configuration in the good old xorg.conf.

To better support snippet-based xorg.conf, a new tag has been introduced: AutoServerLayout. Traditionally, any input device needs to be referenced from the ServerLayout section to become active. With AutoServerLayout, an input device may be present in any layout. Hence, your input configuration may look something like this:

Regardless of which layout is started, the touchpad will always be part of the input device list.

InputClass matching

With the hotplugging support, much of the configuration wandered into the HAL fdi files. This was never the best solution but at that time the only available one. With udev, the fdi files went away and instead of requiring users to port HAL-specific configuration to udev-specific configuration, Dan has stepped in and wrote a set of patches that allow similar functionality to the fdi configuration as part of the xorg.conf (or xorg.conf.d).

InputClasses are similar to InputDevices but can apply to multiple devices (and multiple classes may apply to one device). They work on match rules, with the following matches being available:

Their meaning is what they describe, with the first three being substring matches, the others being binary matches. An input class is assigned to a device if all match rules apply. As an example, the following snippet would assign the synaptics driver to all touchpads:

Input classes are cumulative and only apply if a given option hasn't been set yet. Hence, the first Driver match will apply and the evdev catchall needs to be the last file matched. This is a bit odd at first, but it again guarantees that the user-defined xorg.conf takes precedence.

We may see some more match conditions before 1.8 is released, but for now the ones above seem to suffice for the general cases.